No one person changed the face of the 21st century like Steve Jobs. His biographer, Walter Isaacson, says, "His legacy is transforming seven industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, digital publishing, and retail stores. His legacy is creating what became the most valuable company on earth. . . . He was a genius at connecting art to technology, of making leaps based on intuition and imagination."
Isaacson explored Jobs’ personal stories by means of more than 40 interviews in which he and Jobs went walking, or sat in Jobs’ garden, while Isaacson just let him talk. Aware of Jobs’ legendary "Reality Distortion Field," Isaacson supplemented these informal talks by interviewing over 100 of Jobs’ friends, enemies, colleagues, and competitors.
The result is a vivid, if incomplete, portrait of a man who was ruled by contradictions: he was a counterculturist who became a billionaire through business; he was harsh to those he most inspired. Further, Jobs demanded no editorial control over the content of this biography. He did not even read it before his death at the age of 56 from pancreatic cancer on October 5, 2011.
It is an appropriate tribute to Steve Jobs that this biography is one of 100,000 available for instant download at The AudioBookStore.
Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Kissinger: A Biography, is CEO of the Aspen Institute. He is former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine. Isaacson currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.
"This work is not only the biography of the intuitive genius called Steve Jobs but also that of Apple, the world's most creative company. I was absolutely enthralled and became almost obsessive with reading it. I will never use my iPod, iPad or iPhone again without thinking of the man who knew we would need these things and made them. And made them so beautifully. As he said: Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page." Thank you for the music, Steve."
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Shelley (5 out of 5 stars)